


Small Arms Fire

by Sonora



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Male Coping Mechanisms, Spoilers, seriously massive fucking spoilers for GotG2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 00:13:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10842420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: Yondu teaches Peter how to shoot.





	Small Arms Fire

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS!
> 
> I don't normally write for this fandom but come on, that movie was an insane feels fest, wasn't it? There's a snippet of a scene in the movie, like two seconds, that got me crying. You know the one where Peter's flashing through all those moments?
> 
> SOOOOOO MANY GODDAMN FEELS IN THIS MOVIE WHY MARVEL WHY??????????

Honestly, the boy’s been a complete pain in the ass.

Yondu gets that. Kids, in his experience, typically are like that. Of course, it could just be Ego’s kids. Outside the platoon he grew up in - starving and angry and desperate just to make it to bedtime - this brood are the only kids he’s had any experience with. And Peter Quill is worst than most.

He’s whined. Raged. Bitched. Cried - oh gods, has he cried, mostly at night when he thinks nobody’s looking, but nothing escapes Yondu’s notice on his own ship. He knows what’s going on. Peter broke a gunner’s nose within the first five minutes of the tractor beam dropping him in the cargo bay, threw his first two meals back in Yondu’s face, escaped from sick bay and hid in access tunnels for a day when all they were trying to do was get a translator chip in his cerebellum. 

Terrans. Backwards savages.

But at least Peter’s got spunk. Yondu likes that. Peter’s skinny, good for squeezing into tight places, good for thieving, because even if Ravagers are forbidden from trading in children don’t mean a few don’t make it onto a crew now and again. Peter’s whip smart, which is something that Yondu lacks among most of his men, and young.

There’s a reason why the Kree buy babies. Raise up battle slaves from the bottle. Little boys want to please. They're t rainable. Moldable. Useable.

Yondu’s never been interested in owning any slaves. No, Peter wouldn’t last a week in a slave platoon, and it’s his most endearing quality.

Even if it does mean the last two weeks have been hell, trying to figure out what to _do_ about this.

“Where are we going?” Peter whines for the fifth time in the past two minutes.

So much complaining. Like there’s a problem with taking a nice stroll down the sunny bank of a river on an uninhabited moon that serves as his fleet’s supply dump. Let the first mate sort out what’s needed and what can stay behind for a while and what else they might need to go pick up at the next free port. Yondu just wants Peter to stop fucking complaining. (That's it, totally it, no other motives, none at all, no sir.)

“We’re goin’ wherever I say we’re goin’,” Yondu tells the boy, prodding him along with a whistle and a sharp poke from his arrow. “We’re gonna learn you some things.”

“I hate school.”

Yondu thinks about bleak concrete, blood on ground, the day’s lesson on anatomy focused only on how to stop a beating heart. “I hated school too. Ain’t no place for a boy like yourself. I said, we’re gonna learn something.”

“Yeah, like what?”

“A week ago you didn’t know that spaceships were real. So don’t you give me that lip, Terran, or I might think real hard about lettin’ the crew eat you like they wanna,” Yondu tells him. Peter scowls at him and he prods again. 

The crew doesn’t really want to eat the boy. It seems to shut him up, though.

Thank the gods.

The captain before Yondu set up a firing range for the boys just outside of camp. Well, it was stupidity like that which led to his downfall and Yondu taking over, and one of the first things he did was move that range out a ways. Far enough to get a man sweating - the lazy slugs in his crew wouldn’t ever do PT if he didn’t make ‘em - but close enough to still get back to the doc if something goes really tits-up.

He doesn’t anticipate that today, though. Didn’t pack any of the heavy artillery. Just grabbed a couple of low-velocity, small caliber phase pistols from the ship’s armory, a few extra charged-up magazines, and, of course, Peter.

The boy’s eyes get a little wider as they step off the riverside path and down into the clear area, where the targets are set up. The crew cleared it themselves, mostly with a choice selection of explosives, and the ground itself is pitted and cratered as the surface of Terra’s moon. The trees remain on the perimeter, which gives some nice shade at this time of the afternoon.

They keep a nice selection of targets in the little shed at the end of the range, and that’s where he takes them, unlocking the door with his thumbprint and piling a armload of little burst packs into Peter’s arms. They make ‘em out of junk, but they are oh so much fun to shoot.

“Cool pit you guys have. What are we doing here?” Peter asks, as Yondu walks them back to a nice spot.

_Give me an excuse not to turn you over to your dick of a father._

“We are gonna have ourselves some target practice,” Yondu tells him, and starts tossing the targets out into the range. None very far, close up, like you get on ships during boarding. The homemade targets hover about shoulder height off the ground, little taped-up scrap sails deploying for a bigger target. “We are gonna shoot some shit. How’s that sound?”

The Terran boy squints at him. “You’re gonna give me a gun?”

 _Sure am. If you do well out here, I might even let you keep it._

“If you’re gonna be breaking things on my ship, I might as well funnel that habit in a more useful direction.”

“What if I shoot you?”

 _You won’t. You’re no killer, and let’s keep it that way for a while._

“Can’t. I’m wearing force field body armor. Anything you try to do to me will just bounce off me and hit you instead.” He smiles at his own lie, and holds out the weapon. “We’re gonna go over how you take care of one of these later, how you strip it and clean it and keep it in tippy-top workin’ condition. But right now, I wanna see how good you are.”

Peter takes the gun from him, slow, like it’s gonna bite him, and looks up at Yondu, apprehension in his eyes.

Yondu sighs, and whistles, and nails one of the burst packs. Red plasma sparks out, snapping to gas, crashing to the bare earth as ice, a satisfyingly loud boom from the force. He grins, and Peter grins back at him.

First thing Yondu ever shot in training bled. 

These are much better.

“My mom... my mom says I shouldn’t play with guns,” Peter says, voice hitching.

_You ain’t the first boy in the fleet to lose your mommy. Won’t be the last. Gotta get through it._

“Your mom ain’t here but I am, and you better be worth something to me,” he says, and it sounds more like a promise than he means it to. “Let’s see how you do, Terran.”

Peter misses his first five or six shots. Yondu makes an adjustment - his stance - and another - how he’s holding the gun. Peter misses a few more times, but hits a couple of trees on the far end of the range, which is kind of satisfying too. 

After that, though, Peter misses every shot for almost ten minutes, and Yondu just lets him go; he’s getting redder and more upset and is probably gonna cry again, which is a problem on a Ravager ship, so having him funnel some of that frustration into shooting holes in the ground is much, much better. Plus, gives Yondu some time to examine what, exactly, he's doing wrong.

Finally, right when Peter looks like he’s about give up, Yondu whistles, arrow pushing the edge of the gun barrel up before the boy can drop it.

“Don’t look at the barrel,” he says. “Look past the it. Look at the target. See where you want your round to go, and make it go there. Breathe and make it go.”

“I... Mister Yondu...”

And shit, the kid’s crying again.

“What killed your mommy?” Yondu asks, because it seems like the reasonable thing to ask.

Peter wipes his face on the sleeve of the fresh set of clothes Yondu had their tailor whip up. Not red, not a uniform, not yet. He sniffles. “Brain tumor.”

“So each one of those packs is a little floating brain tumor. Don't think. Just blow the shit up.”

Peter nods. Takes a deep breath. Centers. Hits a target with his next shot. It explodes in a rain of glory, and the boy beams up at Yondu. “Did you see that?! I got it!”

“Do it again and then you can gloat. Only as good as your next shot.”

If it’s a harsh thing to say, Peter doesn’t seem to care. Because he’s hitting more than he’s missing now, a smile on his face like he just unlocked some deep dark secret of the universe, and when Yondu leans down to give him a little more direction, he laughs, and nods, and keeps firing.

Yeah, the boy’s a pain in the ass. 

Yet, Yondu knows what happened to the rest of the kids - oh sure, Ego’s never said anything, but Yondu’s not stupid. He knows what child-killers look like. He was raised by them, after all. And this boy's got too much spunk to be fed to the meat-grinder like that.

Not that the Ravager life is so easy. But Yondu's pretty sure.

Peter's gonna do him proud.


End file.
